This would mark the first time the hero, introduced in 1940, would appear in a DC film.
In the wake of the release of the DCEU feature Zack Snyder’s Justice League this week, Deadline reports that Warner Bros. is hard at work developing a solo film featuring Golden Age DC superhero Hourman. The news arrives as the studio continues to move towards DC heroes that don’t contain Justice League members, including the recently-announced Blue Beetle and Zatanna projects.
Hourman is being written by Gavin James and Neil Widener, both of whom are also writing the sequels Now You See Me 3 and San Andreas 2. Warner Bros is producing the film alongside Chernin Entertainment, marking the production company’s first time tackling a DC project. It remains unclear if Hourman will be joining the DC Extended Universe, or be its own solo project, as the Oscar-winning Joker.
With this latest project just recently revealed, fans will likely have to wait a long time to find out what version of the character will be at the core of the film, who will play him, and when the film will be released. Despite how surprising the announcement might be to some, the studio has actually been keen on producing a project featuring the hero for quite some time.
Back in 2013, CW was looking to adapt Hourman to the small screen, but it never came to fruition. Since then, Rex Tyler showed up a few years ago in Legends of Tomorrow, but more recently appeared in the CW series Stargirl played by Lou Ferrigno Jr., where his son Rick (Cameron Gellman) takes up the Hourman mantle as a member of a contemporary JSA. Dwayne Johnson’s long-awaited Black Adam film will bring the superhero team to the big screen, including iconic heroes Hawkman and Doctor Fate, however, it’s unclear if Hourman appears as a member.
This isn’t the first time that DC has developed this project
DC and The CW previously had hopes of giving Hourman a show in the Arrowverse. Those plans never came to fruition, but one version of Hourman did appear in the popular small-screen universe. Patrick J. Adams played the Rex Tyler version of Hourman in two episodes of Legends of Tomorrow. Lou Ferrigno Jr. and Cameron Gellman also played Rex and Rick in Stargirl.
